Exploring the Movement and Place Framework

Future Transport Strategy 2056 sets the 40-year vision and framework for customer mobility in NSW. As part of this vision, the Strategy recognises the importance of shaping our future transport spaces to ensure balance between movement and place.

To support the development of successful places, the Movement & Place Framework promotes the urban design principles that allow local communities to come together in places with vehicle movement, thereby supporting social and economic growth.

The purpose of this research is to use the Movement & Place Framework and Safe System approach to develop a series of evidence-based design principles and guidelines for balancing vehicle movement and place-making, to enhance the development of safe and successful places.

Using virtual reality (VR) and pedestrian tracking technology, the project aims to better understand relationships between pedestrian-oriented urban design elemental variables and safe system treatments to improve the human experience and safety of pedestrians.

Outcomes from this research will facilitate the implementation and evaluation of successful places in collaboration with local councils to determine the real-life impact of different place-making and safety variables.

Streets make up over 80% of public open space and are critical to the active, healthy life of a city. As outlined in Transport’s Future Transport Strategy 2056, successful places have a high demand for movement as well as place, and need to balance different demands within available road space.

The NSW Road Safety Plan 2021 is a supporting plan of Future Transport Strategy 2056, and identifies liveable and safe urban communities as a priority area to progress towards the 2056 goal of zero trauma on the NSW road network.

This plan acknowledges the challenges involved in keeping urban places liveable and safe, and emphasises the need for roads around busy areas (e.g. shopping centres, entertainment precincts, education facilities) to support and encourage the movement of people, goods and services.

The plan is underpinned by the Safe System approach that aims to create a road system that is forgiving of human error and free from death and serious injury by considering how people, vehicles, speed and roads work together to keep people safe.

The Movement & Place Framework underpins Future Transport 2056 and “aims to allocate road space in a way that improves the liveability of places”. In particular, the Movement & Place Framework can be used as an integrated land use and transport planning tool, focused on customer outcomes and the delivery of wider health and wellbeing benefits for the community (Future Transport 2056).

From a place-making perspective, the Movement & Place Framework also illustrates that the human experience of streets is often greatly diminished by the need for streets to act as efficient motor vehicle thoroughfares.

Therefore, it is essential to generate a better understanding regarding the interaction and perception of different street variables and their impact on place-making, vehicle movement, safety and the human experience.

It is also important to understand the impact of place-making elements and how these may influence a pedestrian’s perception of amenity and safety in a street.

Project objectives

The purpose of this research is to use the Movement & Place Framework to guide the development of a series of evidence-based design principles and guidelines for balancing vehicle movement and place-making to facilitate the development of safe and successful places.

Using virtual reality (VR) and pedestrian tracking technology, the project aims to better understand relationships between pedestrian-oriented urban design elemental variables and safe system treatments to improve the human experience and safety of pedestrians.